Archive for March, 2009

YAM is a small boy, wearing hooded orange jammies and owning a pet TV set and a hover-pack. But I’ll see you that and raise ya – YAM is a comic book by Corey Barba told entirely without words. For kids.
Knowing these rather extraordinary facts, I expected YAM to be extraordinary. In a a sense, it failed to meet my expectations. In another sense, I am at fault for having these expectations.

To explain:
YAM lives on a small tropical island but often visits the nearby city. Both are populated by bizarre creatures – his good feline/humanoid friend Gato, the scientifically-oriented May, talking cupcakes, edible tortoises, emotional clouds and more.
The exploits of YAM have appeared in Nickelodeon Magazine over the last few years, and YAM: Bite-Size Chunks collects these yarns along with several new tales. This probably explains the variable formats and styles displayed in the book – colors and black & white, inks and pencils – with stories ranging from a single page to 38 pages. To Barba‘s credit, he seems equally at ease in all of these – YAM remains characteristically YAM whatever the length and technique, and the stories never seem to suffer from the limitations I assume the original medium imposed.

YAM being Yam

The problem with YAM is that while it is original and often charming, it almost never seems to soar – the characters are neat, but nothing much happens to them, the stories often revolve around a single joke or a simple theme, and they are neither very funny nor profound. Unlike the designation on the back-cover, I am not at all sure that this is an All-Ages comic, but, rather, aimed exclusively at kids.

But this, I shall reiterate, is my undoing more than YAM‘s. Coming from the well-respected Top Shelf Productions and described on the same back-cover as “stirringly fun” and “cartooning at its finest”, I expected something that would appeal to me and not only to my kids. Abandoning expectations, YAM proves to be very well executed, full of the right spirit, and, most of all, much fun for the kids. My five-year-old found YAM’s alternative world charming and intriguing, while my three-year-old laughed at the visual puns and fell in love with the adorable characters. For them, the book was a perfect introduction to comics – the absence of words made it possible for them to enjoy the book without my help, and they took turns telling the short stories to each other.

The story the kids found the most bothersome was, however, my own favorite: the 38 pager that Barba added for this collection tells of how YAM fell in love with the girl of his dreams, and then fell in dreams and forgot about reality. It contains most of the book’s surrealistic scenes, and possesses an eerie, dream-like quality that is the closest YAM comes to meeting my (misguided, I know) expectations.
There’s no doubting Barba’s talent, but if I could be self-centered for a moment, I wish he would write more lengthy stories and use the same talents to let us see YAM – or other denizens of his obviously impressive imagination – reach its full potential. The result, I wager, would be enchanting for adults as well as children.